Is Bread Healthy? You May be Surprised

Do you know how the smell of certain white breads baking in the oven can conjure up memories of happy times, of family and comfort, of Becky Sue dressed in red gingham kneading dough, a dust of flour on her rosy cheeks?

It’s because white bread, mainly the crust, gives off great-smelling chemicals—chemicals that smell like caramel, flowers, and even corn chips.

Not so with whole wheat. Its chemicals smell earthy, malty, and with a hint of cucumber, and it’s all due to the ferulic acid in the bran of the wheat bread.

Specifically, the ferulic acid in wheat bran blocks the production of 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline, the molecule responsible for the enormously attractive “golden” odor associated with white bread. But once you remove the bran, as you do in white bread production, it removes the ferulic acid and allows the less attractive chemical odors to dominate.

So it’s perfectly understandable that people would choose something that smells like candy and flowers over something that smells like the can of earthworms Dad dug up before he went to the fishing hole.

Manufacturers may remove ferulic acid from whole-wheat bread so it smells wonderful, too, but polyphenol, despite its killjoy chemical actions on odor, is a very beneficial polyphenol, and removing it would be a nutritional mistake.

But ferulic acid isn’t the only valuable polyphenol found in whole-grain breads. There are, in fact, many. But bread in general, even refined bread, also provides several coveted vitamins and minerals that can cause deficiencies in non-grain eaters.

But back to the anti-carb folks who sullied Becky Sue’s memory by avoiding bread altogether for fear of blurred muscle definition. These people are asking for nutritional problems.